just one step at a time…

Creating an activist Twitter bot

In my workshop at Digital Pedagogy today, we discussed how and why someone might want to create a twitter bot. The uses of such bots can vary widely–they can be playful (such as the Billy Joel bot, which tweets out song lyrics) or can expose hidden behavior (such as the Valley Edits bot, which shows edits to wikipedia from Silicon Valley).

Sign up for a new Twitter account (a few tricks: you can use your regular gmail account by adding +something to your name. For example, I used janaremy+something@gmail). Also, you will need a cellphone number when you sign up, but you can recycle your own cell number from your regular twitter account by texting “stop” to 40404, and then re-use your cell number for your new account.

Sign up for Buffer, which can schedule your generated Tweet content. In Buffer, add your new twitter account and choose the schedule that you want to use for your content. As an example, I chose to publish my content 8 times per day, and Buffer then selected the appropriate schedule for that frequency. (note: so that Buffer would accept my new twitter account, I had to follow a few people and also gain a few followers–so be prepared to have a few friends who will be willing to follow you):

Sign up for IFTTT to create a ‘recipe’ to publish your content to Twitter. In IFTTT, select the option to create a new recipe. It will then ask you to define the following:

If This: For your This, choose for the trigger to be Twitter, and then select for it to search for usage of the word lame:

Then That: Select Buffer at the service, and then edit for the following content to be added to Buffer, to create an at-reply to the users who are using the word lame in their tweets:

After creating your recipe, select the option in the Upper Right corner to “Check Now” and then toggle over to Buffer and check if your tweets are populating:

A few other notes: I linked to a few articles in my new twitter feed account that raise awareness about ableist language. I am hopeful that this will educate people who receive @replies from my bot. Also, I’ve already managed to piss off a random person who received a reply from my bot. I suspect that this will happen fairly often, and I also suspect that Twitter may shut down the account, once it becomes obvious that it’s behaving as a bot and @-replying people that I don’t follow. I’ll report back if/when it’s shut down…

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One thought on “Creating an activist Twitter bot”

Thanks so much for this writeup, if only for that tip on how to clear your phone number. I have like 10 accounts, and they require a unique phone every time to get to the developer tools (I would say this is l*** but that word is now removed from my vocabulary).

Both the replies your bot got and the tweets it picked up peel back that layer to the seamy side of twitter. I wonder if the replies with “tweet removed” indicate if people deleted their tweets after your bot’s response. I might count that as a small win.